Wow. I can’t believe a) I’m just now finding out I’ve had eight draft ‘photos of the day’ ready to go for the last year and never posted them, and b) how much the one from September 5, 2009, can now be seen with some seriously bittersweet irony, as it’s about my ‘biggest regret of the trip’ being not getting photos of assies and cat ovens. Clearly that is the first one to be belatedly posted. This may be just the kick in the ass I needed to start blogging again. So check it out: miandering is back! (And maybe eventually she’ll actually write something new…)

Photo of the day
September 4, 2010 (originally dated September 5, 2009)

One of the biggest regrets* of my trip (Seriously. What is there to regret, really?) is that when I was in Bali I saw but never got a photo of the Isuzu SUV I saw with a decal on the back window that said ‘ISUZU TOTAL ASSY.’

So when I saw these boxes on the shelf of the motorcycle repair shop at which I was getting my laundry done (no joke) in Rantepao, Sulawesi, I was SO happy. I went back to my hotel and got my camera, but ended up dilly-dallying too long and the shop was closed when i got back (Another regret! Why did I choose that particular moment to wash my hat?).

I texted my friend Rob, who made a joke about the danger of my getting a motorcycle damper assy in the rain. Rob had been with me on the road in Bali and known of my unfulfilled longing for a total assy photo, and now I remembered that he had coined an expression I now felt compelled to not only adopt but promote. You see, there was a guy at Tutmak Cafe in Ubud, where Rob and I often hung out because it had free wifi. This guy, however, was there more than often. He appeared to live there. Even when we stayed until closing and finally left as the staff was locking up, he was still there. He had a Mac Book Air and always sat in the same seat. We sometimes sat on the couch opposite him and my last night there there was a problem with the connection and I mentioned something to Rob about losing my Skype icon and Mac guy freaked out on me about how you’re not supposed to use Skype there because it uses too much bandwidth. He was a jerk, it was true, but I didn’t think much about it.

Shortly thereafter, when I was in Flores, Rob told me that he’d arrived at Tutmak early one morning and, very purposefully, taken Mac guy’s seat. Mac guy arrived a minute later and was apparently seething, refusing even to respond to Rob’s (pleasant, I’m sure) ‘good morning.’ When he told me this I actually thought this was a pretty rude and petty thing to do, but he’d said ‘No one is a total assy to my friend and gets away with it!’ which was sweet enough. It was only several days later that I suddenly came to appreciate the full comic and vengeful brilliance of his action.

In any case, the now-lost damper assy opportunity put me in mind of all this, resulting in my posting this Facebook status: Mia Lipsit wants you, too, to adopt her new expression ‘total assy.’ Not sure what it means but it has something to do with vehicles, as in ‘Isuzu Total Assy’ and ‘motorcycle damper assy.’ To be used as in, ‘That guy is a total assy.’

But back to Rantepao.

As luck would have it, though, my bus the next morning that I was told would leave at 8 am (“If all the passengers are here at 8, it will leave at 8.”) was, ha, actually a 9am bus (The guy who sold me my ticket refused to acknowledge he had said any such thing to me. My guide had served as my interpreter when I’d bought the ticket the day before, but still, his English was impeccable…). This left me with some unexpected extra time in town, which normally might have been an annoyance but in this case was a blessing.

My first order of business was to go back to the shop and take this photo. I was ready to be all ‘Hello I came to take a photo of your damper assy’ but no one at the shop said anything or even looked my way at all. Score. Next task was to go by another hotel to try to pick up the falling-apart copy of David Copperfield which had been offered to me by a young English woman with whom I’d failed to meet up the night before. I found her eating breakfast (and, as it turns out, she was taking the same bus as me, not only well aware that it was meant to leave at 9, but awaiting a pickup directly from the hotel. No fair!) Still…double score!

A fairly successful morning, I’d say. And not a bad start to a day of ten hours on an uncomfortable bus.

*The other biggest regret was not getting a photo, when I was in South Bali, of a sign that said ‘CAT OVEN.’ I actually saw another cat oven sign in Jakarta a few days ago on my way to the airport, but as I was again driving by, a photo was not possible, so this still remains but a dream. (Cat oven had long been a mystery but a few days ago I finally figured out that ‘cat’ means ‘paint,’ which I just now brilliantly verified by googling it. Oven…not so sure, but if it’s for painting cars perhaps they do call them ovens…)